Is it wrong of me to pass judgment on a book that I haven’t read? No, I say, on the authority of Malcolm Gladwell—who argues in Blink that a quick first impression is often correct—that I am justified in thinking myself enough of a littérateur to know before I reach the end of the first page if I will enjoy a novel or short story. I wasn’t always so confident. I spent a good number of years reading the first fifty pages of every book I picked up, thinking the author deserved to be given at least that many pages to convince me to read on. But as I grew older and time grew shorter, I decided to alter my approach.
Now, I give every book I read one page to prove itself. That’s it. The reason I feel so confident in the single page approach—aside from Blink, which is really very good—is that at a certain point I realized there is strong correlation between style and content. In my years of copious reading I have rarely encountered a book that is well styled yet dull, and conversely, it seems that an author who has stumbled across an arresting subject always manages not to botch the writing. That being said, I don’t want to give the impression I put a lot of books down. I wish life were that simple. Instead, I tend to find a lot of moderately interesting books by writers of mediocre talent.
Of course, I am not making a profound argument by stating that a great book will contain both excellent prose and a compelling story, that a bad book will have neither, and that the vast majority will be somewhere in between. What I do find interesting, however, is the ways in which content and style influence one another.
When Proust, for example, decided to write a pastoral recollection of childhood, he had little choice but to do so in a style that matched the story. If In Search of Lost Time had been written with Hemingway’s terseness, the novel would have been a failure, its affect having been diminished. The material dictates the style, and because of this, I not only know immediately whether I will enjoy a book, but I also know almost exactly what kind of narrative I’m in for.
With all of that as prelude, it should come as no surprise that I knew at once I would enjoy Blink based on its relaxed and informative tone. It should also come as no surprise that based on the bleak, flat, and gray tone employed by Cormac McCarthy on the opening page of The Road, I felt no need to read further. Of course, I wasn’t too keen about reading The Road in the first place, but I have a rule that each year I have to pick up the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award, and without question, anything that is named the best book of the past twenty-five years by Entertainment Weekly, so didn’t really have much of a choice.
My trepidation stems from the experience of slogging through one of McCarthy’s earlier novels, Outer Dark. The prose seemed deliberately opaque and twisted, and the plot centered around a tinker and a stolen baby born of incest. What, really? Yeah, really. That grind combined with these opening sentences was enough for me. At this point the ghost of James Joyce could appear to recommend Cormac to me in a dream, and I wouldn’t give him another try. If anything, I’d seriously reconsider my feeling about Joyce.
Click here for Red Beard’s film review of The Road.
